Forage lichens are pendulous, hairlike species eaten by a wide range of mammals. Our overall goal was to estimate losses of Bryoria, a genus of ecologically important forage species, in forests subjected to disease and fuel reduction treatments at Starkey Experimental Forest in the Blue Mountains of northeastern Oregon. Specific objectives were to...

Anthropogenic nitrogen (N) deposition has had substantial impacts on forests of North America. Managers seek to monitor deposition to identify areas of concern and establish critical loads, which define the amount of deposition that can be tolerated by ecosystems without causing substantial harm. We present a new monitoring approach that estimates throughfall inorganic...

Although prescribed burning is common in the Southeastern United States, most fuel models apply to only western forests. This paper documents a fuel classification system that was developed for plantations of loblolly and longleaf pines for the Upper Coastal Plain region. Multivariate analysis of variance and discriminant function analysis were used to confirm eight...

Nitrogen (N) pollution is a growing concern in forests of the greater Sierra Nevada, which lie downwind of the highly populated and agricultural Central Valley. Nitrogen content of Letharia vulpina tissue was analyzed from 38 sites using total Kjeldahl analysis to provide a preliminary assessment of N deposition patterns. Collections were co-located with plots where...

Both the National Fire Plan (http://199.134.225.50/nwcc/t2_wa4/ pdf/RuralAssistance.pdf) and the Healthy Forest Initiative (http://www.fs.fed.us/projects/ hfi/2003/august/documents/hfi-fact-sheet. pdf) call for reduction of hazardous fuels. Consequently, estimations of forest fuel loading at various scales become necessary. The Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA)...

Air-quality monitoring in the United States is typically focused on urban areas even though the detrimental effects of pollution often extend into surrounding ecosystems. The purpose of this study was to construct a model, based upon epiphytic macrolichen community data, to indicate air-quality and climate in forested areas throughout the greater Central Valley of...

A fundamental goal of the forest inventory in interior Alaska is to accurately estimate carbon pools in a way that sheds light on the feedbacks between forests and climate. In boreal forests, moss and lichen mats often serve as the interface between soils and the atmosphere, therefore characterizing the biomass and composition of mats is essential for understanding how...

Rapid expansion of natural gas drilling in Sublette County, WY (1999-present), has raised concerns about the potential ecological effects of enhanced atmospheric nitrogen (N) deposition to the Wind River Range (WRR) including the Class I BridgerWilderness. We sampled annual throughfall (TF) N deposition and lichen thalli N concentrations under forest canopies in four...

For two decades, the US Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, has been charged with implementing a nationwide field-based forest health monitoring effort. Given its extensive nature, the monitoring program has been gradually implemented across forest health indicators and inventoried states. Currently, the Forest Service's Forest Inventory and Analysis...

Federal land managers in the US can be informed with quantitative assessments of the social conditions of the populations affected by wildfires originating on their administered lands in order to incorporate and adapt their management strategy to achieve a more targeted prioritization of community wildfire protection investments. In addition, these assessments are...

Biomonitoring can provide cost-effective and practical information about the distribution of nitrogen(N) deposition, particularly in regions with complex topography and sparse instrumented monitoring sites. Because of their unique biology, lichens are very sensitive bioindicators of air quality. Lichens lack acuticle to control absorption or leaching of nutrients and...

Nitrogen (N) deposition is impacting a number of ecosystem types in California. Critical loads (CLs) for N deposition determined for mixed conifer forests and chaparral/oak woodlands in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California and the San Bernardino Mountains in southern California using empirical and various modelling approaches were compared. Models used included...

Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) are a class of air pollutants linked to a wide range of adverse health outcomes, including asthma, cancers, cardiovascular disease, and fetal growth impairment. PAHs are emitted by combustion of organic matter (e.g. fossil fuels, plant biomass) and can accumulate in plant and animal tissues over time. Compared to criteria...

In this report we provide a framework for assessing cross-boundary wildfire exposure and a case study application in the western U.S. The case study provides detailed mapping and tabular decision support materials for prioritizing fuel management investments aimed at reducing wildfire exposure to communities located proximal to national forests. The work was motivated...

1. The assessment of terrestrial wetland carbon stocks has improved greatly since the First State of the Carbon Cycle Report (CCSP 2007) because of recent national inventories and the development of a U.S. soils database. Terrestrial wetlands in North America encompass an estimated 2.2 million km2, which constitutes about 37% of the global wetland area, with a soil and...

Chronic, excessive nitrogen deposition is potentially an important ecological threat to forests of the greater Sierra Nevada in California. We developed a model for ammonia bioindication, a major nitrogen pollutant in the region, using epiphytic macrolichens. We used non-metric multidimensional scaling to extract gradients in lichen community composition from surveys...

Our development of lichen elemental bioindicators for a United States of America (USA) national monitoring program is a useful model for other large-scale programs. Concentrations of 20 elements were measured, validated, and analyzed for 203 samples of five common lichen species. Collections were made by trained non-specialists near 75 permanent plots and an expert...

The objective of this chapter is to characterize the distribution of carbon stocks and fluxes in terrestrial wetlands within North America. The approach was to synthesize available literature from field measurements with analyses of resource inventory data to estimate wetland area, carbon stocks, and net ecosystem exchange (NEE) of carbon and methane (CH4) fluxes of...